A Christmas story

When I came to from the day after "almost the Mother of all hangovers", something was wrong.. In fact there was three things: 1) it was far to early, 2) I had yet to open my presents and 3) I felt a damm sight worse than the day before.. Christ I felt afloat? I was sure that I had left those beers in the fridge well alone last night, and why were my bedrooms blind’s banging back and forth into the window? I fell out of bed, staggered like a drunk to the bathroom thinking it must be a serious illness, grabbing onto the basin to maybe throw-up I could then feel that it was not just my brain vibrating like a strange drum but the whole apartment block.. Running back to the window and the increasingly dancing blinds, I could see the water in the pool far below sloshing up and down in one big wave, it was like a giant had lifted one end of a paddling pool and let it drop. My mind turned over, Earthquake. shit, now what do I do?? As I raced to put on my shorts and a tshirt to bolt down the stairs I suddenly had a visualisation of dieing running down the 13 floors as the building collapsed. I took the easier option that any child would and cowered under my pillow in bed waiting for the ceiling to come down, eventually the movements stopped and inexplicably I drifted into sleep.

Over the next few hours before the waves struck the various coasts, I dreamt of being trapped in a beach-front hotel as first one floor and then the next and then the next got submerged under a steady but unstoppable tide. I can still remember how I escaped to the safety of a hill and could only watch as other guests screamed and jumped from their rooms as if from the Twin Towers.. Later that afternoon I would realize just how scary this premonition was.

A few dazed days later on New Year's Eve I was sitting listening to Jazz in my local bar, I asked the quiet but friendly looking guy next to me how he was doing. "I'm am Ok" he said with what I thought was a smile but there was also something undescernable in his eyes. "Where are you from?" I asked, he paused "North Sumatra". Then he looked at me to see if I understood. Clearly I could never understand. Later he told me that he had just that day found out his family survived, but the town he lived in simply did not exist anymore and nearly eveyone else who lived there was missing.

The reason I posted this is that today I saw this photo of a town in N.Sumatra. This site has more stunningly tragic photos.